What makes YOU take a book from the shelf?
It’s a question that every bookshop, publisher and agent ponders. It’s a question that every writer should ponder too, if they want to make a living from writing. Covers matter, and titles matter. And I’ll be talking about covers in a while But when it comes to titles, there are some rules (with their exceptions):
• The Tale of… is a guaranteed way to title a book that won’t get published (except for the curiously similar The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time)
• Single word titles are masculine (apart from Perfume and Chocolat, of course)
• The + verb is for horror (The Shining etc)
• Oppositions work – as in War and Peace, From Here to Eternity, To Have and Have Not, Crime and Punishment …
The main thing to remember is that a title needs to be memorable! And the second, nearly as important thing to remember, is that you the writer will have become familiar with your working title and so it will ‘feel’ good to you. An agent or publisher will come to it cold, and it may not ‘feel’ nearly so good to them. So which do you want – a perfect title or a published piece of work?
Right, I’m sure we agree it’s the latter (don’t we?) so if your publisher/editor/agent isn’t keen on your title, brainstorm until you come up with a shortlist of six or so and try them out – you may discover that one of them is actually much better than your original.
All of which sounds great, and as if I know what I’m doing, so why am I completely blank when it comes to thinking up alternative titles for my current novel …
8 Comments
Yvonne Young
28th August 2008Great tips, but the blank page looms large for me, that plus always managing to start a piece of writing, then move on to something else. I just like buying notebooks.Must be more disciplined.
Thanks for the humorus way you write.
Kay Sexton
28th August 2008Ah, don’t get me started on notebooks – I have an entire shelf of notebooks and yet each story seems to require me to buy a new one … more disciplined indeed!
Nik's Blog
29th August 2008I remember having this conversation with the lovely Gee Williams( http://www.geewilliams.blogspot.com/) who said that she finds the title’s already there in the prose; it’s just a question of finding that right phrase. Now I’ve never used that method myself, but I do rather like it.
Nik
Jim Murdoch
29th August 2008So, what about names as titles? As soon as I see a girl’s name I think about Jilly Cooper (Imogen, Prudence, Pandora, Emily et al). I can’t think of any books with a single male name (apart from Mandingo and I’m not sure I want to go there). Oh, there’s Trout Fishing in America but that’s not a real name so I’m excluding it.
Kip de Moll
30th August 2008Glad to have you and your family healthy again.
My only novel attempt was a title combining the gist of 3 quotes and was such a mouthful, no one could get to the first paragraph.
My stories and blog entries receive their titles from a voice inside of nowhere that seem to shine through like the sun melting an early morning mist. The best are ones I have nothing to do with beyond writing them down.
Kay Sexton
1st September 2008Interesting idea Nik – I shall ponder that one.
Jim, you’re right (about Mandingo too, how nice to know that somebody else admits to having read that particular piece of nastiness) there’s Tom Brown’s Schooldays and Nat the Naturalist and all that but they are all male names plus something, not just male names. How odd.
Kip, I feel exactly like that – my titles at present are all mouthfuls and yet somewhere out three the inspiration must be waiting, mustn’t it?
Jim Murdoch
1st September 2008Actually I ran across a novel quite by chance after writing this called simply Tom. So there. Oh, and I never said I’d read Mandingo.
Lou
5th September 2008I’ve seen a trend of books with very similar titles
“The memory keeper’s daughter”
“The time traveler’s wife”
“The taxi driver’s daughter”
“The pirate’s daughter”
I know there are lots more that include somebody’s wife, daughter, son etc. etc. Your TPM is a bit similar to that, so I think it could work very well!